Most of us, from the general public to professional economists, use the term inflation pretty loosely. It’s increasingly applied to any rise in prices, and even economists use it interchangeably with a rise in the cost of living. This Commentary explains what inflation is, why it should be kept distinct from a rise in the cost of living, and how some statistical measures attempt to distinguish between the two.Inflation (Finance) ; Cost and standard of living

Michael F. Bryan

English

Research Papers in Economics

and import taxes can make acquiring
foreign goods more difficult. These are
all real changes in our economic situa-
tion and are reflected in higher costs to
us. So, too, many events improve our
well-being—cause the cost of living 
to fall—including new technologies 
that improve crop yields or the fuel-
efficiency of furnaces, or medical break-
throughs that enhance life in ways that
previously were not possible at any cost. 
Consider figure 1, which shows the cost
of buying the same bundle of goods (or
market basket) for every year between
1960 and today. Again, there are two
ways to think about how the cost of
acquiring this basket has changed over
time. In terms of dollars, the basket con-
tinually gets more costly. Specifically,
what cost $6,000 in 1960 would cost
roughly $36,000 today—a sixfold
increase. But does that mean it is six
times more difficult to buy things today
compared with 1960? Of course not. It
only costs six times as many “dollars.”
The sacrifice required to buy this bundle
of goods has not increased. In fact, it has
fallen, and substantially so. One way to
see this is by answering the following
question: “How many hours would you
May 15, 2002
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Is It More Expensive, or Does It Just Cost
More Money?
by Michael F. Bryan
ISSN 0428-1276
Most of us, from the general public to
professional economists, use the term
inflation pretty loosely. It’s increas-
ingly applied to any rise in prices,
and even economists use it inter-
changeably with a rise in the cost of
living. This Commentary explains
what inflation is, why it should be
kept distinct from a rise in the cost 
of living, and how some statistical
measures attempt to distinguish
between the two.
My grandmother used to say, all too
repeatedly, “I remember when a ham-
burger only cost a nickel!” There are two
ways to interpret what she was saying.
The first is that getting a hamburger
requires a greater sacrifice since they
now cost about a dollar. And I wouldn’t
be surprised if grandmother was remi-
niscing about an earlier, seemingly hap-
pier time. But as an economist, I under-
stand that grandmother might have
intended to say nothing at all about the
value of a hamburger, only that the value
of money had changed. Indeed, she
might very well have understood that
hamburgers are easier to come by at a
dollar than when they “only” cost a
nickel. It is just that nickels are even eas-
ier to come by! 
Here we see illustrated the distinction
between two economic concepts. A rise
in the cost of living means that one’s
ability to maintain a certain level of
well-being has diminished. Prices may
or may not have risen, but people’s
income relative to prices has fallen. The
other concept, inflation, refers to the
deterioration in the purchasing power of
money—a rise in prices that comes
when the central bank has created too
much money, leaving people’s income
relative to prices unchanged. Inflation
does not mean it is more difficult to
maintain a particular lifestyle, only that
its cost in terms of money is “inflated.”1
This Commentary discusses the defini-
tion and measurement of the cost of 
living and inflation—concepts that are
distinct, but are commonly talked about
as if they were the same. When one
hears about a rise in the “cost of living,”
it is impossible to know whether the
term refers to a change in only the
money cost of life, or to the difficulty in
maintaining a certain level of welfare.
But it is useful to appreciate the distinc-
tion between these two ideas. The causes
of inflation and a rising cost of living are
fundamentally different, as are their
remedies. Furthermore, keeping the 
difference in mind helps one see how
price statistics such as the consumer
price index (CPI) combine cost-of-living
changes (which the central bank cannot
control) with inflation (which the central
bank can control). In other words, if the
central bank’s objective is to eliminate
inflation, it might not always find mea-
sures like the CPI the most useful 
statistics for monitoring inflation—
especially in the short run. 
■ The Cost of Living versus
Inflation:  A Descriptive
Example
The boss wants to move you to New
York City from Cleveland, Ohio. As you
consider the move, you will no doubt
reflect on the fact that New York is an
expensive place to live. To buy in New
York the same things you buy in Cleve-
land, you’d better be prepared to pay
considerably more for them. In fact,
according to recent estimates by the
American Chamber of Commerce
Research Association, it costs approxi-
mately 31 percent more to live in New
York City than in Cleveland. So unless
the boss agrees to a 31 percent “cost-of-
living” adjustment to your income, you
will find it more difficult to maintain
your current lifestyle in the more expen-
sive New York marketplace.
Just as one’s cost of living may vary
from one place to another, the cost of 
living can vary across time. Many events
can reduce our well-being, which is to
say, cause our cost of living to rise.
Droughts make food more precious, oil
shortages make it harder to stay warm,need to work to buy the basket of
goods?” In 1960, this $6,000 market
basket would have cost you about 2,800
hours of work. In 2000, it would have
cost 1,700, or 39 percent fewer, hours
(figured using average hourly compen-
sation, which was only about $2 in 1960
but is approximately $19.50 today).
What accounts for the fact that the cost
of this market basket in terms of dollars
is continually rising even though it is
easier to acquire? The answer, simply
enough, is that dollars are getting easier
to come by because the central bank is
creating more of them relative to the
amount of things there are to buy. This
is inflation.
■ Definitions, Past and Present
In a 1997 Commentary, “On the Origins
and Evolution of the Word Inflation,” I
argued that the term “inflation” originally
appeared during the latter half of the
nineteenth century to describe a condi-
tion of money, not prices. An inflated
money was a paper money with a dimin-
ished claim to gold; because so much of
the paper had been printed in proportion
to the amount of gold it represented, the
purchasing power of the paper was actu-
ally much less than it appeared. 
Today, our money is fiat (essentially
costless for the government to produce)
and not limited by our stock of gold. So
how does the issuer of money, the cen-
tral bank, know when it has produced
too much money? The answer to this
question is relatively straightforward: If
the central bank oversupplies money,
the purchasing power of money falls, or
in other words, the money price of
things rises. That is, inflated money will
reveal itself when the prices of things in
terms of money rise. So the central bank
must monitor the behavior of prices as a
way of detecting inflation. But over time,
people have blurred the distinction
between how inflation is measured with
what inflation is. Indeed, today one often
hears the word “inflation” used when
what is meant is simply “price increase.” 
Even in economics, the meaning of infla-
tion can be perplexing. A survey of 34
college textbooks I found in the library
reveals that about half define inflation as
a “general rise in prices.” A general (or
aggregate, or overall) rise suggests that
to be “inflation” the price increases must
be broadly diffused across the market
basket. This characteristic distinguishes
inflation from merely any price increase.
But the other half of the textbooks define
inflation as a “sustained” (or “contin-
ual”) rise in the general price level. By
adding persistence to the phenomenon,
these definitions imply that a process
underlies the upward movement in
prices. While the nature of that process is
usually left unsaid, it certainly hints at a
monetary origin. 
Consider an energy shortage that causes
gasoline and heating bills to rise and
national output to shrink as firms scale
back production. Clearly, this general
rise in prices reflects an increase in the
cost of living. After all, our lives have
become more difficult. As we now must
pay more for energy, we can afford fewer
of the other things we used to buy. Note
also that the drop in available energy
does not cause continual rises in the aver-
age level of prices. Once prices rise to
their new, higher level, the process stops.
It is hard to imagine that anything other
than a continual increase in the quantity
of money relative to the number of
things there are to buy could cause all
prices to persistently rise. As long as the
central bank continues to create money
at a faster rate than the rate at which
additional goods and services are being
produced, prices will rise. But remem-
ber, this sort of rise does not mean that
the cost of living has changed. Indeed,
our incomes will increase right along
with prices, and unlike the price
increases caused by the energy shortage,
these increases do not reflect a direct
reduction in our well-being. 
Only a handful of college economics
textbooks make the monetary nature of
this process explicit by emphasizing 
that inflation is something that occurs
only to the money price of goods. Paul
Heyne, in The Economic Way of 
Thinking, however, goes to great length
to draw a distinction between cost-of-
living changes and inflation:
“Inflation is not a rise in the cost of living.
Inflation is basically a fall in the value or
purchasing power of money. Looking at it
another way, we can say that inflation is
a rise in the money price of goods. You
may even, if you wish, speak of inflation
as a rise in the money cost of living. But
the key word is money.” 
■ The Measurement of the 
Cost of Living and (Core)
Inflation
In theory, cost-of-living changes are
measured by envisioning the cost of
attaining a certain level of welfare and
comparing that cost in different places
or different periods of time. Unfortu-
nately, “welfare” is impossible to quan-
tify and a more practical approach is to
calculate the cost of a representative
market basket of goods and services and
compare that cost between two places
(like Cleveland and New York) or two
periods of time (like 1960 and today).
This is the basic idea behind the con-
sumer price index, the dollar cost of a
fixed basket of goods and services 
purchased by the average urban 
consumer. Produced by the U.S. 
Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor
Statistics, this popular statistic has 
suffered some unfortunate criticism in
recent years, so much so that Congress
created a special advisory committee 
to investigate the construction of the
index and make recommendations for
improving the measure. 
FIGURE 1 COST OF A 1960 BASKET OF GOODS AND SERVICES,
MONEY PRICE AND HOURS WORKED
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
0
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
3,000
Dollars (in thousands) Hours worked
SOURCE:  Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.for example, has suggested that the core
inflation statistic assign weights to price
changes on the basis of their observed
historical persistence. (Mark Wynne
describes Dow’s technique in a working
paper—see the recommended readings.)
Goods that fluctuate widely from month
to month would be assigned lower
weights, and goods that show more 
stable growth patterns would get higher
weights. This “variance-weighting”
approach means that no item in the 
basket necessarily has a weight that
bears any relation to what one would
find in the typical household budget.4
Table 1 compares the market basket
weights used to construct the CPI, the
CPI excluding food and energy, and a
simple variance-weighting approach. 
Although measures of core inflation
vary by technique, most cast off the
notion of cost of living (or any other
welfare conception of cost), in an effort
to identify the persistent part of the gen-
eral price increase that the central bank
can influence, inflation.
■ Conclusion
A major problem caused by inflation is
that people are apt to confuse changes
in the dollar cost of things with changes
in the real cost of things. That is, they
are likely to confuse changes in the cost
of living with inflation. In this Com-
mentary, I have stressed the difference
between these economic concepts
because they are often discussed as
though they are the same phenomenon.
They are not. The cost of living is a
welfare concept. It is intended to
describe how hard it is to achieve a cer-
tain level of well-being. Indeed, the
cost of living is a relevant economic
concept even in a world absent
money—a barter economy. 
Inflation, however, is a nominal con-
cept, arising only when the money cost
of things increases over time. Although
central banks have no ability to system-
atically influence the cost of living, they
can rid the world of inflation by care-
fully managing the money supply. How
well they do so, however, at least par-
tially depends on how well they can see
the object they hope to keep in check.
■ Footnotes
1.  Of course, inflation causes hardship
because it makes using money to carry
out market transactions more problem-
atic and thereby lowers overall welfare.
I will not dwell on this complication.
CPI excluding Variance
CPI food and energy weightsa
CPI components (percent) (percent) (percent)
Food at home 8.5 0.0  2.6
Food away from home 6.2 0.0 36.3
Beverages 1.0 0.0 2.1 
Shelter 31.5 40.3 20.3
Fuel and utilities 4.5 1.1 0.6
Furnishings/operations 4.8 6.6 8.5
Apparel 4.4 5.6 1.6
Transportation 17.1 18.6 0.7
Medical care 5.8 7.4 11.9
Recreation 6.0 7.7 8.4
Education/communication 5.8 7.4 6.0
Other goods and services 4.3 5.5 1.0
TABLE 1 A COMPARISON OF CPI COST-OF-LIVING WEIGHTS TO
SELECTED CORE INFLATION MEASURE WEIGHTS
(AS OF JANUARY 2001)
a.  Variance weights are computed as the inverse of the individual (i) components’time-series variance 
relative to the sum of the inverse of component variances, or wi = (1/       )/ ( ∑ 1/      ) (computed over the
January 1993 to December 2001 period).
SOURCES:  U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; and Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
σ
2
i σ
2
i
Many of the problems identified with
the CPI (and other similar market bas-
ket approaches) have been well known
to economists for nearly a century.
Most arise because the basket of goods
and services used to compute the cost-
of-living statistic gradually becomes
dissimilar to the basket of goods and
services actually purchased by con-
sumers. The lack of comparability
between the statistical market basket
and the true market basket creates a bias
between the measured statistic and the
actual cost increases being encountered
by households. This bias is an impor-
tant statistical puzzle that makes the
market basket approach to measuring
the cost of living difficult. But another
problem is that market basket statistics
also pick up inflation because they 
measure the money cost of the basket.
That is, the CPI can rise even if the cost
of living is constant if the Federal
Reserve continues to oversupply money
and makes the dollar an increasingly
inflated measure of cost. 
Price statistics that attempt to isolate 
the persistent rise in the general price
level are commonly called core (or
sometimes, underlying) inflation statis-
tics. One gauge of core inflation is the
long-run growth trend in the cost of the
market basket. These time-series aver-
ages take the approach that we will see
the persistent component of aggregate
price movements only once it has
revealed itself to be persistent. But this
approach involves such long horizons
that inflation-minded central bankers 
are left monitoring data of an economic 
situation that is long past.2
An alternative procedure for measuring
core inflation is to reconstruct the mar-
ket basket in a way that reduces the
influence of transitory price fluctuations
originating in various components of the
index. The idea here is that although
such price swings may reflect changes in
the cost of living, they are not part of a
persistent rise in the general price level
that comes from a monetary source. The
best-known core inflation statistic
excludes food and energy goods from
the consumer market basket, and virtu-
ally every major central bank in the
world uses some variation of this tech-
nique to turn a market basket price 
statistic into an inflation measure.
This is a dramatic difference in measure-
ment. By excluding some components
of the market basket, the measure no
longer reflects consumer spending pat-
terns and therefore fails to qualify, in a
meaningful sense, as a cost-of-living 
statistic; volatile or not, food and energy
are important to our cost of living.
More statistically sophisticated
approaches to the measurement of (core)
inflation, called “stochastic” index 
numbers, weight price data purely on the
basis of “signal-to-noise” criteria, 
disregarding completely the items’
importance to consumers.3 James Dow,Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Research Department
P.O. Box 6387
Cleveland, OH 44101
Return Service Requested:
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the above address.
Material may be reprinted if the source is
credited. Please send copies of reprinted
material to the editor.
Michael F. Bryan is a vice president and
economist at the Federal Reserve Bank 
of Cleveland. 
The views expressed here are those of the
author and not necessarily those of the Fed-
eral Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the Board of 
Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or
its staff. 
Economic Commentary is published by the
Research Department of the Federal Reserve
Bank of Cleveland. To receive copies or to be
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to 4d.subscriptions@clev.frb.org or fax it to
216-579-3050. Economic Commentary is also
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where glossaries of terms are provided.
We invite comments, questions, and sugges-
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2. In related work, Cogley (2002) com-
putes what he calls an adaptive measure
of core inflation that averages past move-
ments in the cost-of-living statistic such
that the largest weights are given to the
most recent data, which then geometri-
cally decay as the vintage of the data
increases. In this way, the core inflation
measure is more timely than the cost of
living’s long-run growth trend.
3. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleve-
land produces a statistic called the
median CPI, an extreme variant of a
class of statistics called trimmed-mean
estimators. These statistics are similar to
the core inflation measures as they, too,
attempt to filter out high-variance move-
ment in the individual price data. But
unlike other core inflation statistics, the
trimmed-mean estimators retain the
exact weighting structure of the CPI and
therefore gauge the cost change of the
same basket of goods tracked by the
CPI. In this way, the trimmed-mean esti-
mators are more akin, statistically speak-
ing, to the cost-of-living measure.
4. Similarly, Bryan and Cecchetti
(1993) weight price changes on the basis
of a statistical model that separates price
movements unique to individual items
from movements shared by all items in
the basket.
■ Recommended Reading
Bryan, Michael F. 1997. “On the Origin
and Evolution of the Word Inflation.”
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland,
Economic Commentary (October 15).
Bryan, Michael F., and Stephen G. 
Cecchetti. 1993. “The Consumer Price
Index as a Measure of Inflation.” 
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland,
Economic Review 29 (4), pp. 15–24.
Cogley, Timothy. 2002. “A Simple
Adaptive Measure of Core Inflation.”
Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking
34 (1), pp. 94–113.
Wynne, Mark A. 1999. “Core Inflation:
A Review of Some Conceptual Issues.”
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Work-
ing Paper 99–03 (June).

Is it more expensive, or does it just cost more money?

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Is it more expensive, or does it just cost more money?

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